UCLA football mailbag: What can the Bruins do about these special teams?

UCLA is now eliminated from postseason play, save for extreme Pac-12 chaos, but there are still big games remaining for the Bruins with USC and Stanford waiting at home to finish the season. First, UCLA heads to the desert to face Arizona State on Saturday at 11 a.m. PT on Pac-12 Networks.

As always, I welcome your questions for this weekly feature. You can send them to me on Twitter at @thucnhi21 or via email (thnguyen@scng.com). Let’s get to the A’s to your Q’s.

In his first meeting with the media this week, Chip Kelly was asked extensively about special teams. I wrote about it Monday. He said the difference will be in attention to detail.

Some of the mistakes were just execution errors. The players know what to do, they just didn’t get it right that time. Stefan Flintoft knows he can’t punt the ball inside the hash marks, but he mis-hit the ball, it landed exactly where he didn’t want it to and he got burned for it. Adarius Pickett was standing on the 12, was coached to not back up much further to catch the punt, wanted to follow the instructions, then was caught between minds when the ball carried a little further than he anticipated. After the false start on the field goal against Utah, I’m sure the entire team knows not to flinch, but sometimes weird things happen and they’ve unfortunate.

I could imagine the coaching staff making a change at punt returner to give Pickett a moment to take a breath after two straight games with a muffed punt, but in general, I don’t think it’s necessarily about trying to do new things. It’s just about doing the things right.

During practice, I noticed that coaches were more vocal during special teams periods this week, especially Kelly, who was hands-on during a drill on Wednesday. I also think I saw them working on situations when field goals went awry (like last week’s bad snap/hold that forced Matt Lynch to try to scramble for a long-shot first down) and how to block on those occasions. Now it’s about transferring the instructions from coaches into execution from the players on Saturday.

I was at Autzen, and DTR didn't seem very vocal with other qb's or engaged with team after bad drives and being pulled. Is he a bad team mate from what you've seen or heard?

I want to first make sure to state that Dorian Thompson-Robinson didn’t “get pulled” for poor performance. He appeared to re-aggravate the injury to his right shoulder, which prompted the change.

After Thompson-Robinson’s first start against Oklahoma, I did this story about how he was starting to grow into a leadership role, but certainly there are different ways to lead. A conundrum for Thompson-Robinson could be that he’s on opposite ends of the leadership expectation spectrum. On one end, he’s a true freshman who didn’t join the team until the summer. Freshmen are expected to just keep their heads above water and find their way around campus. But he’s also a quarterback. They’re expected to set a tone for the entire team by example or vocally or both. So it’s hard for one person to fill both roles, especially a quarterback who has so little starting experience at the position.

Teammates recognize the competing roles Thompson-Robinson has to fill. When asked of Thompson-Robinson’s leadership the week after the Oklahoma game and the importance of a quarterback as a leader, offensive lineman Michael Alves said, “The quarterback is definitely the captain of the offense. Usually the quarterback is the captain of the team, but he’s just a freshman, so you can’t expect that.”

Thompson-Robinson impressed teammates, including Alves and fellow offensive lineman Justin Murphy, with his performance and leadership ability in his first career start at Oklahoma.

In terms of sideline demeanor, Alves also said body posture is important for a quarterback in setting a tone, and added of Thompson-Robinson’s leadership responsibilities: “He’s got so much to do. I couldn’t imagine being a quarterback in this offense. He’s trying his best with that so anything else is just extra for him.” (For his own contribution, Alves said his only quarterback experience was in seventh-grade flag football. He said it didn’t go well.)

I’ve seen some good moments of body language from Thompson-Robinson. In the season opener, a receiver dropped a pass and the quarterback pushed his palms toward the ground, giving the signal to calm down. He didn’t appear frustrated. I thought that was positive. But there were also moments with less-than-stellar optics like when he walked toward the sideline after throwing an interception with the play still going or last week when he threw his head back in exasperation after an early false start.

DM question: “Is Chip Kelly doing a good job? Is he really building for the future? Or is the team on a downward spiral?”

I know the last game was the type of game that made many fans want to scratch their eyes out with each passing special teams mistake, but I don’t think you can doom the program to a downward spiral nine games into a brand new tenure. This spring, I thought that the team had a chance to challenge for bowl eligibility. They’re obviously not going to be do that (except for this particular scenario, uncovered by the Bay Area News Group’s Jon Wilner, in which the Pac-12 South collapses and UCLA inexplicably has a chance at the Rose Bowl). But with so much unknown about the state of the program heading into the year, preseason predictions about this team meant even less than they do in normal years because all if it was a blind guess.

The record looks terrible at 2-7, but you could see the team’s potential in games like Oklahoma, Washington and Cal. The job the staff has done with the patchwork offensive line, which has allowed Joshua Kelley to become the breakout star of the season, is quite impressive. We all understood that the offensive line was going to be the biggest question mark of the team. Now they’re blocking for a running game that averaged 4.1 yards per carry. UCLA hasn’t done that since Paul Perkins was running the ball. So there are signs of progress. They can be difficult to see through the forest of execution mistakes sometimes, though.

DM question: “We’ve got talent – how could we be this bad?”

I feel like someone asks a version of this question every week. Was my first answer, which is the answer I link to in other mailbags, not sufficient? I just don’t get what else I can say about it. If those two previous answers don’t suffice, message me back with a follow up question and I’ll try to explain it in a different way.

(seriously) how much of the blame for this season's underperformance falls on coaching (i.e. special teams) versus lack of talent and/or talent that wasn't coached by the pvs coaching staff?

Coaches get the blame when things go wrong, players get the praise when things go right. That’s how sports are. But in reality, there needs to be a proper connection between the instruction from the coaching and the execution from the players, and both sides are at fault when it breaks. Stefan Flintoft talked about it this week when asked of working with special teams coordinator Roy Manning:

“His focus on (special teams) and what he emphasizes and his drills and what not, I just feel like they translate over very well. Obviously, this past game is not the best example of it, but that’s not all him. You can’t just blame one person, especially a coach, so we just have to go out and remember our training.

“Like I said (last week), turn your mind off, let your body do what it knows how to do,” Flintoft continued. “I think we got away from that this weekend as players and we’ll clean that up this week and next week will be much better.”

Coaches are responsible for doing everything possible to get players in the right position to execute and then the players have to go execute. It’s impossible to really separate the two, although when it comes to college sports, the coach is always going to be the first to take the heat in the court of public opinion. As the man collecting a multi-million dollar paycheck, he should.

(See previous answer about talent.)

It does seem like there are bad habits remaining from the previous coaching staff, specifically the missed tackles and penalties. But there was some improvement in those aspects: Kelly said the Bruins went from 18 missed tackles against Arizona to 24 missed tackles against Utah to 12 against Oregon. Twelve is still 12 more than most people would like, but it went in the right direction. Jim Mora was known to say that he was OK with some “aggressive” penalties, which he in some ways viewed was a sign of at least good effort. Those always appeared to happen at the most inopportune times as well, like third downs, but I feel like a lot of the penalties last week were more procedural. They’re annoying nonetheless, but theoretically easier to fix. Last year, UCLA averaged 9.22 yards per penalty, and this year, the number is down to 8.16 yards per penalty.

Last few games of the season, what freshmen have not played yet and can still play these last three while maintaining their redshirt? Any you expect to play?

At this point, I wouldn’t expect any of the players who haven’t played to play, although with some injuries mounting and if games turn into a blowout, I suppose anything is possible. The offensive linemen, Gaines, Anderson and Beckett, would be the least likely to appear in a game in my mind due to the lack of substitution on the line in general. The tight ends Alaimo and Priebe likely wouldn’t jump in either as there are three other scholarship tight ends with Caleb Wilson, Jordan Wilson and Devin Asiasi, and the coaching staff has shown willingness to play walk-on Drew Platt as well. There are a lot of other options at defensive back, but because there’s some rotating at that position, Patrick Jolly might be the most probable in my mind to play if someone was going to play, but again, I don’t think anyone will.

What's the team's routine before home/away games? Do they stay on campus before games? What about team meals, oh and does Chip still have the team on a special diet or meal plan? Too demoralized to send an actual football question

For away games, Fridays include a chartered flight and a practice, although I’m not completely sure if the order is guaranteed each time (i.e. whether it’s flight and then practice on the road or practice at home then fly). Saturday is game day, sometimes there are meetings and walk-throughs before the game depending on kickoff time. Then the team charters a flight out immediately after.

For home games, I think the team would want to stay off campus to eliminate distractions and make travel easier in terms of getting to the Rose Bowl.

A lot of the players talked during training camp raved about a new nutrition plan. There are more meals provided at the football center throughout the day and the meals are designed to be healthy as well.